Anna Kendrick recently opened up about her experience with a toxic relationship and how she “dismantled” her life in order to deal with the tumultuous nature of the relationship.
Speaking with Dax Shepard and Monica Padman on the podcast Armchair Expert, the 37-year-old Alice Darling actress shared her story of surviving a toxic relationship and how her new film resonated with her.
“I was coming out of a personal experience with emotional abuse and psychological abuse,” she explained, recalling the time she first came across the screenplay. “I think my rep sent it to me because he knew what I’d been dealing with and sent it along. Because he was like, ‘This sort of speaks to everything that you’ve been talking to me about.’ ”
Kendrick revealed that she had been in a serious relationship with this person for six years whom she did not name, even going so far as to create embryos with them.
Unfortunately, things began to unravel when her partner started to display a personality shift and later revealed he had feelings for someone else. Even with all the signs that something was wrong, Kendrick still hoped to work things out through couples therapy.
She explained, “It wasn’t just the, ‘Oh, I’m losing a relationship.’ It was that I believed that if we broke up or if he left basically, it was a confirmation that it’s because I’m impossible, I’m lucky that he’s even tolerating my b—–t. There was an inherent thing of me being so rejectable that this person who loved me very deeply for six years, it suddenly occurred to him, how awful I was or something. The shame, that lingers much longer.”
Kendrick went on to describe how she “dismantled” her life in an attempt to work through the tumultuous relationship and get to a more stable place. She said, “I did start going to Al-Anon while all this was going on. I mean, look, I truly dismantled my life, and at first, that was as a reaction to the accusation that I was crazy and I was the one causing the problem.”
She continued by saying, “So I had a conversation with CAA, my agency and said I need to take time off, I have a mental health problem. I started seeing two therapists a week and I started trying to learn to meditate and I got into Al-Anon and all of these things ended up being very wonderful things for me in the long run, but initially went into them thinking, ‘Tell me how to stop being crazy. Tell me how to stop feeling anything.’ ”
Describing her former relationship, Kendrick said, “I was in a situation where I loved and trusted this person more than I trusted myself. So when that person is telling you that you have a distorted sense of reality and that you are impossible and that all the stuff that you think is going on is not going on, your life gets really confusing really quickly. And I was in a situation where, at the end, I had the unique experience of finding out that everything I thought was going on was in fact going on. So I had this kind of springboard for feeling and recovery that a lot of people don’t get.”
